Shabazz Palaces is an arty, avante-garde collective with a fine handle on hip-hop head music. Lynchpin Ishmael Butler talks to JIM CARROLL
ISHMAEL BUTLER has experienced a few jousts during his time in this game. Back in the 1990s when he was known as Butterfly, Butler was one-third of Digable Planets, a combo who threw down some fantastic, gleeful boho jazz shapes over the course of the two fine albums Reachinand Blowout Combreleased during their heyday.
With Digable Planets largely – though not completely – off the grid these days, Butler has a new bag of out-there rhythms and rhymes to talk about. Operating under the moniker of Palaceer Lazaro, he’s the lynchpin for Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, an arty, avant-garde collective who’ve already demonstrated a fine handle on hip-hop head music.
Case in point: that brace of splendidly fried EPs from last year which set tongues wagging about Shabazz Palaces in the first place. More evidence: this year's startling Black Upalbum for Sub Pop, where Butler's lucid, stream-of-consciousness freestyle poetry comes packaged with deep, wide and exotic sounds. As Butler swings through pop cultural motifs, urban activism and Afrocentric mythicism, the music rolling behind him seems to be broadcasting from a dimension beyond the clouds.
Charting such space-age trips, says Butler, was always the plan. “I wanted to see where the music would take us,” he says, after a lengthy pre-amble about his last trip to Dublin and his encounters in some of the city’s pubs.
“We had no expectations, no plans, no destination we wanted to arrive at. We just came in and started making music because we felt we had to do that.
“There was a bigger drive behind it than just getting a record out. I felt compelled by another force to make this music. It’s an instinct which I couldn’t resist.”
For now, at least, Butler is staying schtum about who else is involved and seems content to be the focus of attention. “We’re artists and musicians and this is what we do and that’s all people need to know,” he says.
“They don’t need the back story. We’ve always made music as individuals, so it was natural and unhurried and unstressed to do this when we came together. The idea came about five years ago, just from hanging out together and coming up with ideas and working through our inspirations and influences.
“I really want people to find us on their own, you know. I don’t want to be part of something which is forced on people or pushed on an audience. That’s not how it should be. It’s about the final work, the songs you hear.”
Butler talks a grand game, especially when it comes to further amplifying the mystique which has surrounded this new project. You’d expect nothing less, given the subliminal frequencies which Shabazz Palaces are exploring, but Butler really thrives on this notion of being the great hip-hop enigma of the Pacific North-West.
“Yes, there’s mystique because I wanted to keep things quiet for a long time. We’re operating on a completely different level to everyone else, which is a very archaic and unusual concept for many now. For far too often, it’s about having attention from the very start long before you have anything to say. I didn’t want anything to represent us until the music was ready to do that.
“When we were making this music, it felt very spiritual and other-worldly and divine. It was like you were going through this very enlightened phase, but you didn’t even know you were experiencing it until it was over.”
The Shabazz mystique also extends to the fact that Butler has adopted another alter-ego for this outing.
“These different personas and characters come from inside. It’s more than just for show, it’s an opportunity to do something different. Yes, I’m the same person I was 10 years ago and there’s some of my character left over from that, but there’s also been changes and those changes are reflected in the music and hence the new persona.”
While Shabazz Palaces will hang their hat in the hip-hop department, Butler knows that the script has been well and truly flipped. “We came of age during hip-hop’s golden age, even though we didn’t know it was that at the time. When we started out making hip-hop, it was a different game, it was a calling. Now it’s an industry.
“I enjoyed what we did before [with Digable Planets]. It was fun. But I don’t know how Shabazz Palaces fits into hip-hop now. I don’t really think about that all too much because it was never the intention to fit in to begin with.”
Perhaps one of the reasons why the Shabazz releases to date have resonated so well with so many is because Butler and his friends have bucked every trend and rulebook. There’s no Shabazz factory turning out these sounds.
“We don’t follow formulas. I think most artists think they do that but they eventually follow some kind of path because they think that’s what it takes to be successful. But that was not for us because we were doing this for pure, artistic reasons. We wanted to be the way we are without copying someone else’s game. No one dictated terms to us.” But Butler is cool with the idea that what Shabazz Palaces are doing right now may go on to inspire others in the future.
In fact, that idea seems to tickle his fancy a lot.
“You can’t force something like that but that would be great, to be an inspiration to musicians to come. We were inspired by so many different things, from abstract art and visuals and emotions to the great jazz music of the past, that it would be quite special to think we’d go on to inspire others. You can’t predict that’s going to happen, but it would be quite great. “
Black Upis out now on Sub Pop
